


Little blank windows

by keeptheearthbelow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-26
Updated: 2013-03-26
Packaged: 2017-12-06 13:20:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/736147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keeptheearthbelow/pseuds/keeptheearthbelow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Peeta's locket. My awkward take on how Peeta got the picture of Gale before the Quarter Quell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little blank windows

She's pinning shirts on the line. She has nobody's laundry to do but her own family's (and Haymitch Abernathy's), now, and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon. She's been wondering if the outcast by association situation will spread to her younger three, but they insist everything's fine at school. So she's pinning up their shirts, thinking about whether she can delay Vick having to take out tesserae if she can get Rory's to stretch even one more day through the month, when a young man's voice says behind her, “Mrs. Hawthorne?”

She turns, expecting Peacekeepers, as you do. But it's Peeta Mellark.

She pauses, feeling wrongfooted. Katniss had been planning to come by after they were done with their studies this evening, and she has complained a little too strenuously about how much of a taskmaster her supposed fiance is about all this training. So how is it that they're done early, and why is the wrong kid here? “Is everything all right?” she asks cautiously.

“Oh —” He's surprised by that. “Yes ma'am. I'm sorry, I should have asked you when you were back up in the village — I just wanted to see if you had a few minutes.”

She frowns and bends to get another shirt from the basket at her feet. As she pins it on the line, she says, “Don't often see you at this end of town.”

He pauses, then says, “I've been a little more often lately. They let me bring bread to the community home.” Carefully leaving vague who the “they” is, though she knows full well it isn't the home administrators or his parents, because she has also listened to Katniss gripe about how victors aren't allowed to do anything charitable. Says the girl who wouldn't take charity if it was her only alternative to death.

Peeta's gesturing at the huge basket strapped to his back. “That's what all this is. But I wanted to stop by and see you first.” 

“Mm.” She pulls the last shirt — or not a shirt, this is a frock that Posy's about to outgrow — from the basket and pins it up. He just waits for a response. Well, that should be no surprise, he seems to have the persistence necessary to pursue Katniss Everdeen. She picks up the basket. “Come in.”

She wonders what the house looks like to him. Merchant boy now living alone in one of those mansions. She wonders if he has Seam friends from school, if he'd ever been this way before he had bread to bring to orphans. She thumps the basket down on the kitchen bench. “You wanted a word?”

“Yes ma'am.” He lifts the strap of the basket off from around his chest and lets it rest on the floor by his feet, but he doesn't ask to put it down or sit anywhere. “You know how tributes can take a token into the arena?” She nods. Of course. “So apparently Effie Trinket wants us all to have these matching tokens this year. To match Katniss's pin. She sent a couple things to Haymitch and he let me pick between them.” He fishes something out of his pocket and shows it to her. A gold pendant on a chain, suddenly the most expensive thing in this house. Katniss's mockingjay is etched on the pendant. He pokes his thumb along the edge and it springs open like a book, with little blank windows inside. A locket. “The other token Effie sent was this sort of bracelet. But I have something I want to do with this.”

She looks at him, still waiting. He's chewing his lip. “Spit it out, kiddo.”

He grins sheepishly. “Well. Is there a photo of your family? That I could fit in here somehow? I already got Prim to sneak me a photo of her and Mrs. Everdeen. And I thought for the other half that your family would be the best choice.”

She raises an eyebrow. The windows are barely bigger than the pad of her thumb. “You do realize we're a family of five?” 

“Yeah. And I realize you may not have a photo you'd be willing to spare. I found this camera in my house and I brought it with me in case it would be better if I, you know, took a photo of the photo.”

She taps her fingers on the table. “So you're going to swap tokens with her, is that it? She'll wear this?”

“No.” He clears his throat. “I'll carry it in. What I'm thinking is … if she kind of forgets what she's in there for. To survive. That it's worth it, that she can do it. Because it's kind of easier, when you're in there, to think the world has shrunk down to the arena and there's nothing else. So if she forgets, well, I want to be able to remind her.”

“You don't think a picture of Prim will be enough?”

She looks up to find Peeta's head dropped, hiding his expression. “It would've been last year. But now she knows what it's like to try to come home afterwards. It'll be harder.”

She stares at him, trying not to think of what another arena will do to this girl so dear to her, trying to figure out what to do with this kid on her doorstep.

Eventually he looks up. “Look. I know it'll piss her off, if I lay this on her in the arena. I don't really care. I'll do what I want with the rest of my life and that's whatever it takes to get her home. I would like to have a picture of all of you, because I know she promised to help look after your whole family. But you're right, it's a tiny locket, so if there's just a picture of Gale, that'll do. I don't know what you'd think is a fair trade, but I brought bread and cookies as a start. And if you don't want to do it, that's okay, I'll figure something else out. But either way, I hope you won't let her know I asked. I know she talks with you and really likes you and it's asking a lot of you not to let her know.”

Damn, so it's true, he can do it in person. It isn't a trick of the cameras that he can just stab you through the heart. 

And now he's just silent, blushing a bit, waiting to see what she'll say. Gale, if he'd ever had to ask anybody for something like this, would be frustrated and demanding by now. Rory, no different. Katniss would've run in embarrassment, if she'd managed to spit out the question in the first place. Peeta just inexplicably holds his ground. 

“Sit down, kiddo,” she tells him. She goes into the other room to get a couple of pictures she keeps on her shelf in there. She collects the others she keeps on the mantel. She lines them up on the kitchen table. “I won't spare any. But you can take photos of them and see what'll work.”

She watches while he looks them over. The picture of her husband in front of the mines when he was young, which they let you think is a point of pride until it turns out to be an identification picture in death. The same photo of Gale. A handful of family photos with the children at varying ages, including ones back in the days of a father and no daughter. Peeta points to one that's from about two years ago. “What made Gale smile here, do you know?” 

She squints at it. “Not sure. Posy, probably.”

He settles on that one. There's a newer one, but Gale isn't smiling in it. Peeta pulls a tiny, shining gadget from his pocket and snaps a few photos, fussing around with how the light is playing off the picture frame. She has no idea how much that camera would fetch, even if anyone had money to buy it. When he puts the camera back in his pocket, he says, “I don't know whether I'll be able to make it small enough to get anybody else in. I'm sorry about that.”

“You're a strange one,” she tells him. “Giving a girl a picture of some other boy.”

He shrugs. “It's okay. I thought they were together too, you know. I didn't mean to mess anything up.” He won't look at her. Instead, he opens the top of his basket and pulls out a smaller parcel. “May I leave this with you?”

It's hard to take the parcel without even inspecting it, without dickering. She can't remember the last time she did that. “Yes. That'll be fine.”

“Thank you so much, Mrs. Hawthorne,” he says, a little formal, a little apologetic. He closes up the basket, puts it back over his shoulders, collects the locket on its chain and puts it back in his pocket. “I come to the community home every few days. Will you let me know if you could use anything else?”

Could use. Ha. She can already smell the sugar in whatever's in this package. “Sure.”

“Great,” he says, and gives her a sunny smile that makes no sense, and heads out the door.


End file.
